


Under the Hill

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: Rattlin' Bones - Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
Genre: Angels vs. Demons, Child Abduction, F/M, Fairies, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Wild West
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:27:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24205141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: Bones aren't the only thing beneath the ground.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6
Collections: Jukebox 2020





	Under the Hill

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



First, there were the townsfolk who watched, covetous of the acres of flourishing corn and fat cattle I would one day inherit, and muttering about how abruptly my parents’ fortunes had changed since the birth of their first and only child. One or two must have seen how my shadow danced just out of step with my feet, the way I shied from the rails and from salt spilled across a dinner table. The way some folks were drawn to me like moths to the light until a young man fresh from Mexico with money and prospects had begged for my all-too-eager hand.

The day I walked in my Sunday best from the one-room church on my beloved’s arm, the day I placed my hand on the long trestle table laid beneath the bright awning outside to lead the toast with the wine laid aside by my parents, they struck. A nail, blessed or packed in salt or simply hardly touched by the forge, tore through my flesh to lay bare myself: the skin like bone under moonlight, the frame too delicate to be entirely of this earth, the eyes hollow with the darkness that had glanced briefly from every reflection I had looked on since my childhood. I fled in my Sunday shoes and dress of blue linen, fled into the hills until there was no more sky, only earth that pressed upon me like death and the womb.

***

_The bag is always heavy in my hand, cutting off the blood flow to my wrist, tangled around my leg like a convict worker’s ball and chain. I can only bear it as best I can, each step, each tiny clack of one rock wearing down another a pebble to dam the flood of the years. I have floundered and bobbed but not drowned, too stubborn or too unearthly to join the dead, always looking for another route into the ground where I might, at last, rest my burden._

***

Next, there was a lady, or something like a lady, who had taken my hand and drawn me into the hills where distance had no meaning and a human child with the face taken from me by time and cold iron lay curled at the foot of a great throne. The child wore clothes like moonlight on water, sat surrounded by toys and games and the ruins of a feast. The chain that bound her to the throne by one thin ankle was made of gold.

 _My daughter,_ the lady had said, placing a too-long, too-white hand on my cheek. _My treasure, lent and now returned. You will have your birthright in the world beneath, but there is a way these things are done._

She clapped her hands and the sack was in mine. _You must wear them down to perfect balls, cannon shot to fell the gods and spirits who would keep us from our conquest of this land. Then you may return to the life your parents traded their own child for—_ a gesture to the girl who had been me, seated at her feet— _or to sit by my side, lieutenant of the sidhe’s desert kingdoms. Until that time, darkness will be upon you and your voice gone but you will endure, my daughter. I gave you to the humans for a purpose, and I will see it filled._ Her eyes, dark and wide with the madness of our race, pinned me in place like the nail to the wedding table as my vision clouded with a fog like night, filling the air around me twice my arms’ span to dim the faerie lamps set along the walls, the glow of my own skin.

The child watched as I left in my cloud of darkness, bag slung over one shoulder. The longing in her eyes said more than my stolen voice might have in the years of its absence.

***

_For seven years, vaqueros and their herds shy from me. Good, God-fearing townsfolk close their shutters as I pass by,my darkness smothering the light of their campfires and dimming even the sun. Too long in one place means lawmen with iron-filled guns and men and women with simple shovels, rakes and pitchforks. So I walk, each footprint in sandy soil another chip of a rock, another step toward the destiny I must now earn._

***

Third, there was a preacher with too much light in his face and a coat of feathers like blue and gold sky. In the darkness he glowed like the moon I could never see anymore. “Your soulless kin may have rejected you, but if you embrace us you may be granted a soul,” he told me, and blinked far too many eyes. “The Lord of All will save it, if you will allow him.”

I remembered the steady drone of the circuit riders, their words easing me to sleep like Mother’s lullabies. I remembered standing in the new-built church as the seminary graduate younger than me watched as my beloved slipped the ring onto my finger. I shifted the bag to my other shoulder, remembering the tear of iron through my flesh and illusions.

 _Don’t have much use for the gods these days,_ I thought, clear enough for such creatures as us to hear.

The preacher smiled like a beautiful mountain lion. In the not-light around him I could see wings upon wings like a flock of pigeons blotting out the sky. “Even now your mother’s folk seek war with the hidden folk of this land, surely as white man wars with red. What will you do if she is driven back to the isle whence you came, Sidhe child?”

_This is the land I grew up in, and I’ll take my chances here._

He said nothing, only thinning out into the air where the rest of him was with mocking pity on the face he had put on for me.

***

 _An old medicine man shoves a bag of buffalo jerky into my hands, surely hoping I will leave him and his camp, and I do. A half-crazed railroad worker whose Chinese I don’t understand rests in my darkness, unburdening himself to me as surely as I do to him with hand gestures and lines in the dirt. More rarely, I see signs of the other world_ — _strange-shaped beings dancing on the mesas, coyotes and birds that regard me levelly instead of shunning my darkness. I see none of my mother's kin and can summon no feeling but relief._

***

Fourth, there was a young dude, all silk shirt and gleaming cufflinks like he’d come from the California gold fields just for me. The barest hint of fire flickered in his eyes. “You’d get a better deal with us than with heaven or your fellow fence-sitters,” he told me, earnest as any patent medicine salesman. “We’ll take those weights off your back, settle you somewhere pleasant until such time as you might take your place at the good man’s right hand. He’s got a special interest in you.”

I spat, shifting the weight of the bag along my spine. _Thought you wouldn’t have the use for me. Angel of the Lord seemed to think he was doing me a favor._

The dude shifted with a waft of toilet water and something like smoke and cordite. “ _Au contraire,_ my hill-dwelling friend. Our master does not hold grudges, and he has a special interest in your folk's particular place in the order of things. He will give you pride of place by his side with all the treasures even your mother lacks.”

I thought of Miss Emerson, the old maid who lived in town collecting butterflies and writing about them for journals back East, the especially pretty ones pinned to cork under glass in her parlor, and turned my back on the dude.

***

_“The girl wore out her stone shoes in finding her love,” my mother recited to me. “She wove the nettle shirts and saved her brothers. She performed every task the wicked stepmother set until she was given her reward.” From my small stool beside the fire, I listened, wondering what happened after the shoes were powder and the brothers men once more, bundled up into “happily ever after.”_

***

Fifth, there was a bank, a drug store, and bright-painted houses, grown up where once there was no town at all like flowers after the rains. My parents’ farmhouse lay abandoned, field overgrown by cheatgrass and creosote not picky enough to spurn the lands of a creature cursed by God and man. I stepped past it, staying to the outskirts away from the lamps and cookfires I could see burning in a few windows, afraid to look in and recognize anyone. 

The path into the hills, the hole in the side of the mesa, were clear only to my eyes, and I stepped forward into her court. It was much as I remembered _—_ the carven rock throne, the white flames set in the walls, and at the center of all my true mother, not the quiet, dark-eyed woman who had raised me in lieu of the pale, chained creature at the throne’s feet. The latter stared as though I was the moon come down to earth. Her dress was ripped as if by small fingers, the few toys scattered about her broken and ignored.

I opened my fingers, and the bag fell from them, the perfectly round stones spilling across the rock floor. With a flick of my mother's fingers, my breath had a sound once more. “Now the darkness,” I told her, my voice rusty as the crows whose calls I had envied these past seven years.

Another flick, and the cave was bright with faerie light. My mother waited, hands in her lap. “What will you?” she asked, face serene as dawn. “This land as your own, once we have claimed it from its spirits? Or the holdings of your parents, with every bounty of the Earth herself and brownies and sylphs to attend you?”

In answer, I picked up a stone from the ground, dashing it against the end of the chain where it met the foot of the throne. The child that was me stared up, uncomprehending.

“I am neither of you, nor of the humans.” I picked myself up in my arms, head high, surer than I had ever been. She clung to the ruins of my clothing, eyes wide and shining in the new light. “Not of your land, nor this. I will take none of your gifts or curses, and give this child the life that should have been hers.”

“So be it,” said my mother as I turned my back and stepped into the world.


End file.
